Lorser Feitelson: Magical Forms

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Lorser Feitelson: Magical Forms. This exhibition features works from Lorser Feitelson's series of the same name, which acted as the direct precursors to the artist’s celebrated Magical Space Forms paintings of the 1950s. They represent an important transitional moment in Feitelson’s career, bridging the intellectually and emotionally charged figural content of his earlier paintings and the coolly rational Hard Edge abstract work that he focused on in his later career. 

In the mid-1940s, Feitelson (1898-1978) began to embark on a remarkable departure from his highly symbolic and carefully composed Post-Surrealist work and from the deeply personal allegorical paintings that immediately followed. In stark contrast to his previous work, which focused on representing familiar objects and the human figure, Feitelson now sought to invent novel abstract forms that contained no direct reference to any known image. While his later Magical Space Forms series removed all allusions to volume and three-dimensional space, Feitelson rendered his Magical Forms as fully defined, non-specific physical entities inhabiting tangible yet unearthly environments. Described within a structurally legible visual framework, the exaggerated strangeness of these uncanny forms provides a conduit for emotional expression of the inexplicable.